


The Curious Couple

by Astronomical_Aphrodite



Category: Red Dead Redemption (Video Games)
Genre: Bisexual Dutch van der Linde, Bisexual Hosea Matthews, F/M, Fluff, Found Family, Friendship, M/M, Mostly Canon Compliant, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Polyamory, Pre-Canon, Prequel, Trans Bessie Matthews, Trans Female Character, Young Arthur Morgan, Young Dutch van der Linde, Young Hosea Matthews, because I’m weak for it, early gang
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-06-01
Updated: 2020-06-01
Packaged: 2021-03-03 02:22:11
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,528
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24497146
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Astronomical_Aphrodite/pseuds/Astronomical_Aphrodite
Summary: Hosea and Dutch break out of a jail cell in Ohio, leaving the Sheriff tied up naked in his cell before fleeing the state west towards Indiana, unaware of just who they would end up meeting there.
Relationships: Arthur Morgan & Dutch van der Linde, Arthur Morgan & Hosea Matthews, Bessie Matthews/Hosea Matthews, Hosea Matthews & Dutch van der Linde, Hosea Matthews/Dutch van der Linde
Comments: 1
Kudos: 20





	The Curious Couple

“That could’ve gone better,” Hosea mumbled quietly to him, pressing his head back against the stone wall of their shared jail cell. Eyes closed with crusted blood underneath his nose, he looked as exhausted as Dutch felt. They’d had a long, rough day, and spending the night in the jail cell wasn’t how they expected things to pan out. He couldn’t blame the older gentleman for being tired and embittered by the unfortunate turn their day had taken.

“Those lawmen were damn idiots,” Dutch muttered back to him, nudging him gently with his elbow, “putting us in a cell together like this.” As awful as their drawn-out plot had concluded, with Sheriff Carmichael coming to the conclusion that they were a pair of conmen duping affluent locals into investing into their fake Portuguese shipping company, they still had their earnings hidden safely inside of a lockbox back at their campsite. “We’ll be out come tonight,” he assured Hosea, “and hey! We’re not dead yet.”

Hosea scoffed, opening those warm brown eyes of his just to roll them. For the first time since they’d been taken into custody, his lips twisted upwards into a smile. “You weren’t the one who got punched,” he pointed out, gesturing towards his possibly broken nose. Dutch winced at the blood that covered his mouth and chin.

“Then again,” Dutch mused, “we didn’t commit a violent crime.” The farmers and businessmen of a small town in the backwoods of Ohio heard nothing about the pair of outlaws coming west from New York, hoping to make a name for themselves in the Great Plains. He’d hoped that they’d make a couple hundred more dollars and then make their way to Indiana, but that was impossible, now. “At least they don’t know about the bounty on our heads, yet.”

“Come tonight, they probably will, Dutch,” Hosea deadpanned, his tone one of dry amusement, “and personally, I don’t want to be anywhere close to here when they’re deciding whether to hang us for our long and troubling history of murder, theft, tax evasion—”

“Hey,” Dutch said through his laughter, struggling to keep his voice quiet and low so as not to attract unwanted attention to their scheming, “don’t you go listing our numerous crimes where Sheriff Carmichael can hear us.”

The Sheriff in question, however, was sleeping at his desk with his legs kicked up, while his two deputies played a card game at a table just out of earshot. It was the perfect opportunity for an escape, Dutch figured, and they’d pulled off more difficult jailbreaks together in the past, even though it was in broad daylight. He never thought he would be able to run with someone for longer than a couple of months, but he and Hosea were going on two years, and it didn’t seem like their partnership would end anytime soon.

It was the two of them until one of them died, he supposed. Preferably, he thought privately, they’d go out together, because even after just two years he didn’t know how he’d stay sane without Hosea in his life. It was selfish, sure, but he couldn’t live without his best friend, the most brilliant man he’d ever met.

“Now, are we going to plot our escape now, or at the gallows?” Dutch asked, raising an eyebrow. It was the perfect opportunity for escape, considering that the deputies were distracted and the Sheriff was asleep. “Because now’s the perfect opportunity to escape without giving Bessie a coronary from reading the newspaper. That woman tolerates too many of our antics, my friend.”

That seemed to stir Hosea into action, the older man sitting up with a choked noise of pain that he turned into a small grunt. He had taken a nasty kick to the chest from an overzealous deputy, and probably had some bruised ribs that Bessie would be fretting over if she’d followed them to Ohio from their last hideout in Michigan. The woman had decided she’d meet them in Iowa, whenever they made it there. “I suppose now would be a convenient time,” Hosea mused, “considering they don’t think us capable of putting up a fight, the two conmen with delicate sensibilities that we are.”

“Wouldn’t be too hard to take those bars off the window,” Dutch observed, pointing up towards said window above the singular cell bed, “seeing as they’re already loose—”

“A rather sensible plan, coming from you,” Hosea drawled wryly.

“—but—”

“Of course there’s a ‘but’,” his partner said, rolling his eyes again.

“—I feel it would make a much better point to rob these fools blind,” Dutch finished, a mischievous smile stretching across his face, “and prove just how incompetent these corrupt law enforcement officials truly are.” Hosea looked at him with a fond, exasperated gaze, a soft but exhausted smile on his lips, and he leaned forwards to put a hand on his shoulder. The blonde leaned into his touch, lifting his hand to cover Dutch’s. “ _C’mon,_ Hosea,” he whispered conspiratorially, “don’t you want to give a big _‘screw you’_ to the federal government?”

“Revenge is a fool’s game, Dutch,” Hosea reminded him distantly, but he was already looking out between the bars at the men playing cards, and the Sheriff, asleep at his desk.

As they watched, one man threw down his hand with a frustrated snarl, rubbing his nose as he turned around to start searching around quietly in a trunk while the other, pleased as a cat who’d caught a mouse, turned to look out the window. Licking his chapped lips, cleaning blood off his medial cleft with that long, pink tongue of his, Dutch could see the moment he gave in.

“I’ll take the left one,” Hosea ordered, “you take the right, and try to be quiet about it, else we wake the Sheriff of Nottingham.”

Hosea had always been the better one at the planning and conning parts of their job, while Dutch had always been the superior bargainer and gunman between the two of them. They complimented each other’s skills, covered for one another’s weaknesses, and provided the backup that meant the difference between life or death. Dutch trusted the man with his life, and didn’t bother protesting against the plot. “On your cue,” he mumured.

It took Hosea perhaps ten seconds to pick the lock on their cell, fingers working quick and nimble with the lock-breaking kit that the Sheriff hadn’t bothered taking off him, and when he swung the door open, it thankfully didn’t creak, although he’d known that it wouldn’t. The oiled hinges were something he made note of when they originally threw them into the cell. Creeping out into the main office of the jailhouse, the man on the right was still searching through the chest, having started to mutter curses quietly to himself while he struggled to find whatever he was looking for.

Dutch made simple work of wrapping an arm around the man’s throat, and he hadn’t been able to put up much fight before making strangled noises and clawing weakly at his shirtsleeve before slipping into unconsciousness. He allowed him to slump to the floor, and when he glanced backwards at Hosea, he’d already done the same to the other unfortunate deputy.

“We should steal what we can now,” Hosea murmured quietly, “then wake the Sheriff up so he can let us into that safe underneath the desk.”

Nodding, Dutch grinned broadly at Hosea, and the blonde smiled back at him, winking. Together, they looted the deputies, finding pocket change and some smaller valuables that could sell for a pretty penny at the next fence they managed to find. When he looked inside the chest, he initially didn’t find anything special, seeing as they’d left their sidearms back at camp and the deputies and Sheriff hadn’t taken them, but when he dug deeper, he found a decently sized bag of jewelry. It must’ve been what the deputy was searching for, his way of paying whatever wager he’d lost.

“Found the jackpot,” he whispered, lightly shaking the heavy bag, and Hosea’s eyes widened in a way that made warmth swell in his chest. The bag itself was of a fine leather, and the jewelry inside was worth a week’s worth of room and board, not that they wouldn’t continue camping out and save the money for more ammunition, food for the poor, or whatever else struck their fancy. They’d developed quite the reputation for charity, and he enjoyed giving to those less fortunate than themselves, not that they were fortunate by any means.

But standing up, his foot hooked on a loose floorboard, and the sound of him tripping and falling onto his knees woke the Sheriff with a start, the man glancing between them and his unconscious deputies in horror. “What the,” he gasped, drawing his gun, “how the hell did you—“

Hosea was on him in an instant, pinning him to the ground with his legs around his chest and arms as his gun clattered to the floor, and the Sheriff hollered until Hosea shoved a handkerchief into his mouth. Turning him over, he tied his arms behind his back with rope and did the same with his ankles while Dutch caught his breath, trying to calm the frantic beating of his heart. The Sheriff squirmed on the floor, groaning angrily at them, and Hosea came to grab Dutch’s hand and pull him to his feet.

“So _whatever_ shall we do with him?” Hosea asked just as he thought of the question, a mischievous glimmer in his eyes. Despite him often being the voice of reason, he liked making trouble just as much as Dutch had.

It was hardly a question. “Strip him naked,” Dutch proposed, smiling wide enough that his cheeks hurt.

Hosea scoffed, although his smile widened. “Jesus, you’re impossible,” Hosea muttered, too fond to be properly irritated.

Hosea might have been good at cracking safes, but it certainly helped that the combination for the one underneath the Sheriff’s desk was written in scrawling, blocky handwriting on a slip of paper in the Sheriff’s breast pocket. When the safe door opened and two hundred dollars in cash were revealed, Dutch knew they’d made the right decision by taking the harder way out. Not that it had ended up difficult in the slightest. He shoved the crisp, smooth dollar bills into his satchel while Hosea looked on in amusement.

When he was finished looting the safe, they threw Sheriff Carmichael and his deputies in their former cell, locking the door. The man spluttered indignantly around the gag in his mouth, looking between them incredulously as he tried pulling his knees up to cover his bits, and Dutch mockingly tipped his hat to the Sheriff, bowing on his way out the door of the Sheriff’s office.

“Pleasure doing business with you, Sheriff,” Hosea teased, and with that, they walked out the doors of the Sheriff’s office without a bullet fired, or a man killed. Not only that, but they were several hundred dollars richer, and the dimwitted townsfolk were none the wiser.

“Until next time!” Dutch said, saluting as the door swung shut.

Just outside of town, he mounted Margrave while Hosea mounted his Penny, the two stallions having stayed patiently hitched as their riders busted out of their imprisonment. Spurring them into an easy canter, aiming to get out of the state before the sun worse, when they approached their makeshift camp, they both burst into amused laughter.

“I can’t wait to see what the newspapers say about this,” Dutch wheezed, wiping the tears of laughter from his eyes. It was a ridiculously easy and ludicrously profitable robbery, and he had a hard time keeping his composure just thinking about the entire situation.

Hosea leaned on him, face reddening from his peels of laughter. “Who knew getting arrested would end up being the best time I’ve had in ages?”

Dutch chuckled, nodding in agreement. “Your nose okay?”

“Don’t _think_ it’s broken,” Hosea said, squinting as he gingerly touched the bridge of his nose. It wasn’t crooked at least, so Dutch assumed that even if it had been broken, it wasn’t bad. Not enough to warrant a trip to the physician’s, at least. “I continue to somehow have both good looks _and_ good intellect.”

“Braggart,” Dutch joked, nudging him with his elbow.

They packed unhurriedly, knowing that their spot was a good one, their trail would be nearly impossible to follow with the rainstorm that was approaching in the horizon, and that the Sheriff likely wouldn’t be discovered until morning came. His deputies weren’t going to wake up anytime soon, either.

“I suppose now we’ll head west into Indiana,” Hosea said when they finally had everything loaded into the wagon, his foxtrotter poised to drive the wagon alongside Dutch’s lovely white turkoman, “and figure out exactly where we’re heading from there?”

It was as good a plan as any, considering they would never head towards any large cities willingly, despite the heists and scams that could be pulled of there with a little effort. Major cities and urban areas elicited a certain revulsion in him, sure, but he they were also harder to flee, and he didn’t want to attract attention too quickly, either. “That’s the plan,” he confirmed, smiling mischievously at Hosea next to him.

Dutch would drive the wagon — he enjoyed the task, while Hosea would rather read, or work on his needlework, or whatever else he did in his free time. If there was trouble, Dutch would hand the reins over to Hosea while he shot at whoever was gunning for their heads. As their crimes became increasingly prolific, they’d found and made a lot more enemies, and plenty more bounty hunters trying to chase them down.

Hosea nodded, although the gesture was more for his benefit than out of any sort of agreement with the plan. He always liked having proper goals and plots planned out instead of simple improvisation, although the man could talk the shirt off of someone’s back if he wanted to at the drop of a hat. It was one of his many skills, born from the time when he’d pursued real, honest work as a stage actor, before he’d given up that dream for a life of crime and fighting against the encroachment of so-called civilization.

“Wherever you go,” Hosea assured him, “I’ll follow you, Dutch, until the end of the line.”

Someday, they would probably meet their match, whether at the noose of the federal agents or at gunpoint from a rival gang. What they had, a beautiful freedom from the constraints of society, it couldn’t last forever, not in a rapidly modernizing world. Objectively, that was the case, but Dutch had always been an optimist, and he refused to believe that they’d die anything less than rich, living free and wild out west in California, where they wouldn’t have to conform to anyone else’s idea of who they should be or how they should behave, least of which the capitalistic bastards buying out society right out from under them.

Therefore, he chose to believe Hosea whenever he promised him forever.


End file.
